Dion leaned slightly forward and looked at Dumeny.  Dumeny was sitting bolt upright, and now, as the Judge mentioned his name, he folded his arms, raised his long dark eyes, and gazed steadily at the bench.  Did he know that he was the danger in the case?  If he did he did not show any apprehension.  His white face, typically French, with its rather long nose, slightly flattened temples, faintly cynical and ironic lips and small but obstinate chin, was almost sinister in its complete immobility.

“He’s certainly a corrupt beast,” Dion said to himself.  “But as certainly he’s an interesting, clever, knowledgeable beast.”

Dumeny’s very thick, glossy, and slightly undulating dark hair, growing closely round his low forehead, helped to make him almost romantically handsome, although his features were rather irregular.  His white ears were abnormally small, Dion noticed.

The Judge went with cold minuteness into every detail of Dumeny’s intimacy with Mrs. Clarke that had been revealed in the trial, and dwelt on the link of music which, it was said, had held them together.

“Music stimulates the passions, and may, in highly sensitive persons, generate impulses not easy to control, provided that the situation in which such persons find themselves, when roused and stirred, is propitious.  It has been given in evidence that Monsieur Dumeny frequently played and sang to the respondent till late in the night in the pavilion which has been described to you.  You have seen Monsieur Dumeny in the box, and can judge for yourselves whether he was a man likely to avail himself of any advantage his undoubted talents may have given him with a highly artistic and musical woman.”

There was nothing striking in the words, but to Dion the Judge’s voice seemed slightly changed as it uttered the last sentence.  Surely a frigid severity had crept into it, surely it was colored with a faint, but definite, contempt.  Several of the jury started narrowly at Aristide Dumeny, and the foreman, with a care and precision almost ostentatious, took a note.

The Judge continued his analysis of Mrs. Clarke’s intimacy with Dumeny.  He was scrupulously fair; he gave full weight to the mutual attraction which may be born out of common intellectual tastes—­an attraction possibly quite innocent, quite free from desire of anything but food for the brain, the subtler emotions, and the soul “if you like to call it so, gentlemen.”  But, somehow, he left upon the mind of Dion, and probably upon the minds of many others, an impression that he, the Judge, was doubtful as to the sheer intellectuality of Monsieur Dumeny, was not convinced that he had reached that condition of moral serenity and purification in which a rare woman can be happily regarded as a sort of disembodied spirit.